“Blackmail,” Georgia Blue said. “Well, is she?”
“No.”
“Think she killed him — Rice?”
“No.”
“Who do you think did?”
“No idea. None.”
“Why do you think the Goodisons did a flit, bolted?”
“If they did, I again don’t know why.”
“If you were the Goodisons and wanted to vanish, where would you go?”
“To a very big city,” Broach said, then smiled and added, “Los Angeles maybe.”
“Thanks for your time, Mr. Broach,” Georgia Blue said, rose and turned to give the Daumier drawings a closer examination. Then she turned back to Broach, smiled and said, “Those three Daumiers are fakes, just in case you didn’t know.”
Broach was also smiling as he rose from the too-tall wing-back chair. “But very good fakes, right?”
“Not bad.”
“The Secret Service teach you to do that?”
“They taught me to spot counterfeit.”
“Even counterfeit people?”
“My specialty.”
“Sure you don’t want a job?”
“Quite sure.”
“One more question?”
She nodded.
“Have dinner with me tonight?”
“Sorry.”
“Some other night?”
“Who knows?” Georgia Blue said, smiled her goodbye, crossed to the door, opened it and was gone. Jack Broach assessed it as an absolutely first-class exit.
Eighteen
Were it not for the Hollywood Freeway, the old Trussel mansion would never have made the forty-four-mile journey in 1947 from the fringe of what was then downtown Los Angeles to a five-acre lot near the top of Topanga Canyon.
Once a loosely knit community of assorted free spirits, dopers, mystics, working stiffs, 1960s holdouts, actors, writers, artists and other poor credit risks, Topanga in the late 1970s and ’80s suffered a plague of gentrification that transformed it from a low-rent semi-rural hideout into what one critic called bosky dells with neon.
The fifteen-room mansion that would make the long trip to Topanga in 1947 had been built in 1910 just late enough to escape the Victorian gingerbread craze. The house, destined to be torn down in 1948 because it was in the path of the freeway, was saved only because its owner, Miss Martha Trussel, who had been born in the house in 1911 and fully intended to die there, called on the senior partner of her law firm, handed him a brown paper bag containing $10,000 in cash — a considerable sum in 1947 — and told him to “go grease whoever has to be greased, Henry.”
Permission was quickly granted and the mansion was eventually sliced into three sections and hauled at 3 to 4 miles per hour to the fairly flat five-acre lot in Topanga Canyon that had been left to Miss Trussel by her dead father, who had accepted the five acres in 1932 as repayment for a $300 debt.
Because of breakdowns, steep canyon grades and minor accidents, it took thirteen days to move the house to its new site. The Los Angeles Times thought the event newsworthy enough to run a three-column photograph on page seven of one of the twenty-one traffic jams it caused. The move was directed by Miss Trussel herself, who later supervised the mansion’s reassembly and modernization. She lived in the huge old house alone, save for a series of Mexican housekeepers, until she died in bed of emphysema in 1981, an unlit Chesterfield in one hand, an unstruck kitchen match in the other.
By then the old Trussel mansion had deteriorated to the point where it brought only $165,000 at probate auction in 1982. Twenty-two-year-old Colleen Cullen purchased it with twenty certified checks, each drawn on a different bank or savings and loan, and each made out for less than $9,000. Miss Cullen made it a point to tell anyone who would listen how she planned to turn the old place into a bed-and-break-fast inn, which she boasted would be “the best in the West.”
From the San Fernando Valley, State Highway 27 winds up through the Santa Monica Mountains to Topanga. It then winds back down the other side to the ocean and the Pacific Coast Highway. There, at the junction of Highway 27 and the ocean, knowledgeable drivers, heading for San Francisco or Santa Barbara or even Oxnard, slowed down lest they fall prey to the county deputy sheriffs who had been rented by the recently incorporated city of Malibu, which was suffering from a shortage of funds.
About halfway between the ocean and the Valley, at the very top of State Highway 27, is the Summit Bar & Grill. And it was there that Otherguy Overby sat behind the wheel of his rented Ford sedan, studying a Thomas Brothers map of Los Angeles County. Minutes later, Georgia Blue pulled in beside him, got out of her own rented car and into his.
“You eat yet?” Overby said, not looking up from the map.
“No. Did you?”
“We can get something here.”
Georgia Blue gave the Summit Bar & Grill a quick appraisal, shook her head and said she would eat later.
“You can have a grilled cheese sandwich and a bottle of beer,” he said. “How can they fuck up a grilled cheese sandwich?”
“They’d find a way.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Overby said, closing the map book.
“Know where we’re going?” she asked.
Overby nodded and started the engine. “How was what’s his name — Broach?”
“Slick.”
“He say anything interesting about Ione Gamble?”
“Only that he’s her very best friend and also her agent, business manager and personal attorney. He doesn’t charge for being best friend but gets twenty percent of her gross for the rest.”
“What’d he say about the Goodisons?”
“That he pegged them right off as two sick fucks.”
Shrugging, as if at old news, Overby then asked, “You ever hear of Colleen Cullen?”
Georgia Blue frowned first, then looked at Overby and said, “There was a Cullen years back in Chicago who had ties to both the Black Panthers and the IRA, but her first name wasn’t Colleen. Why?”
“This Cullen’s supposed to run the best lie-low place in L.A.”
“And you want to ask her about the Goodisons?”
He said he did.
“Think she passes out free information?”
“If she’s got any, it’ll cost us. You still have that thousand Booth gave you?”
“I spent it.”
“On what?”
“Shoes and a dress.”
Overby took his eyes off the road and inspected her new shoes and dress, as if for the first time. “Nice. How much?”
“Nine hundred and sixty-something with the shoes.”
Nodding his approval, Overby said, “You and me, Georgia, we always did understand why the right clothes can give you an edge.”
Overby turned his rented Ford off a narrow winding blacktop and onto a brick drive. The Ford’s headlights illuminated a green sign with gold lettering that read, “Cousin Colleen’s Bed & Breakfast Inn.” Stuck up on top of the wooden sign, almost as an afterthought, was a row of small red neon letters that blinked “No Vacancy.”
As the brick drive went on and on, Overby guessed that the inn had been set as far back from the narrow blacktop as possible — probably at the point where the flat land suddenly turned itself into the steep slope of a Santa Monica mountain There were a great many trees, which, even at night, Georgia Blue identified by shape and size as pines, sycamores and the odd eucalyptus. The headlights revealed no lawn to speak of, but did give glimpses of neglected flower beds that featured freeway daisies, Mexican poppies and other drought-resistant strains whose names she didn’t know or had forgotten.
The brick drive ended just past the old house and fanned out into a parking area large enough for a dozen cars. Yet it now held only two cars. One was a white Toyota pickup, fairly new, and the other was an elderly MG roadster with no top. Overby stopped the Ford, shifted into park, switched off the engine and lights, looked at Georgia Blue and said, “Well?”